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As a VC, I strongly agree with all of these tips except for the one about tracking opens. Like most people, I don't love being tracked. I especially agree with

As a VC, I strongly agree with all of these tips except for the one about tracking opens. Like most people, I don't love being tracked. I especially agree with the first tip about a cold email's goal being to pique enough interest to get a positive reply. The goal is not to convince someone to write a check on the spot by writing a 10-page email -- that's an unattainable goal and no one is going to read a cold email that long. To use an analogy, a cold email should be like a movie trailer -- or even a movie poster. A movie poster doesn't give you a long summary of a movie, but it gives you enough info to decide if you might be interested. (I wrote a little about this analogy a few years ago: https://www.codingvc.com/what-movies-can-teach-you-about-pitching-to-investors https://www.codingvc.com/what-movies-can-teach-you-about-pit...). A good rule of thumb is to list ~3 bullet points that you think make your company stand out the most. These could be about the team, the product, the traction, or anything else. It's also good idea to mention your company's stage. Lots of emails don't mention what round they are trying to raise or how far along a company is, and most investors operate in a narrow band. Roughly speaking, pre-seed investors are a fit for <=$1.5m, seed for $1.5m-$4m, and Series A beyond that. If you send emails from your startup's email address and use LinkedIn, add the email address to your LinkedIn profile so that people can search by it. If your name is not unique and your company name isn't in your LinkedIn profile, people won't be able to look up your background and experience. Finally, light personalization helps, faux personalization hurts. Light personalization could be a sentence like "It looks like we both went to Dartmouth!" (human connection) or "I saw you invested in companies A and B, which help accountants and lawyers bring their paperwork online. Our company is helping auditors bring their paperwork online." (shows effort/research). Faux personalization is stuff like "I did some research and based on your investment thesis I think you'd be a great fit" (intentionally vague and can be sent to every investor) or "I see you invested in MediaStartupA and SaaSStartupB, so I think you'd really like my RoboticsStartup" (name-drops startups, but the startups are random and completely unrelated). FWIW most of these tips are not specific to emailing investors, and they can apply to cold emailing anyone.

kordlessagain 7y ago
As a VC, how to you balance the cost of the search for profitability against the unknown costs of harm to the user in the future from certain profitable models?
- lpolovets 7y ago
  Do you mean would I invest in a company that's bad for the world but can make lots of money? I try very hard to avoid those. There are more than enough companies that can make money doing good things.
myguess 7y ago
>As a VC, Have you ever invested - transfer has cleared, they have the money - into a company that cold emailed you?
- threwawasy1228 7y ago
  This is the real question, I would like to see VCs here commenting on investments they made that were not through their network.
- lpolovets 7y ago
  One so far (a company called Pex, the founder's HN handle is doh). Always looking for more. :) We've also done a decent number of investments through accelerators that were not YC. That's somewhere between cold inbound, cold outbound, and warm intro.
- mwseibel 7y ago
  At YC we do this all the time. Its our bread and butter :)
tempsy 7y ago
The irony of a VC saying he/she doesn't love "being tracked" is the whole controversy over the Superhuman tracking pixels. IIRC most of the defenders of the company's practice were VCs (both investors and not)...
- lpolovets 7y ago
  I think aggregate tracking is interesting because it can be informative without violating privacy. For example, for a sales or pitch deck it might be interesting to see if certain slides captures a lot of attention or don't resonate at all. But I don't like individual tracking where it feels like someone is looking over my shoulder while I view a deck. I don't like that Superhuman did that kind of tracking by default, either.

kordlessagain 7y ago

As a VC, how to you balance the cost of the search for profitability against the unknown costs of harm to the user in the future from certain profitable models?

lpolovets 7y ago
Do you mean would I invest in a company that's bad for the world but can make lots of money? I try very hard to avoid those. There are more than enough companies that can make money doing good things.

myguess 7y ago

>As a VC, Have you ever invested - transfer has cleared, they have the money - into a company that cold emailed you?

threwawasy1228 7y ago
This is the real question, I would like to see VCs here commenting on investments they made that were not through their network.
lpolovets 7y ago
One so far (a company called Pex, the founder's HN handle is doh). Always looking for more. :) We've also done a decent number of investments through accelerators that were not YC. That's somewhere between cold inbound, cold outbound, and warm intro.
mwseibel 7y ago
At YC we do this all the time. Its our bread and butter :)

tempsy 7y ago

The irony of a VC saying he/she doesn't love "being tracked" is the whole controversy over the Superhuman tracking pixels. IIRC most of the defenders of the company's practice were VCs (both investors and not)...

lpolovets 7y ago
I think aggregate tracking is interesting because it can be informative without violating privacy. For example, for a sales or pitch deck it might be interesting to see if certain slides captures a lot of attention or don't resonate at all. But I don't like individual tracking where it feels like someone is looking over my shoulder while I view a deck. I don't like that Superhuman did that kind of tracking by default, either.